Best way to track 11 rentals managed by 3 different PMs

[Ian S.]

Hi. We own 11 SFH rentals, spread among 3 property managers (different states). All 3 PMs use Appfolio and pay us monthly. Any expenses go against reserves of $500 per property and if any expenses are higher than that, we make an owner payment through the portal. While most of our expenses for each property go through the various Appfolios, some are done directly from our credit card.

All this has become a bit of an accounting nightmare. Until now we've been using a pretty unwieldy home-baked Google Sheet to track our expenses, but are looking for a more elegant solution.

Our wish list:

1. Must be cloud based - we don't always have the same laptop with us so we need a 100% web based solution.
2. Must be mobile friendly - We want to be able to upload receipts on-the-go and categorize them. We want to be able to pull out our phone and see how a particular property is doing.
3. Must be affordable. We’re really struggling with sticker shock at QB Online $35 a month, Xero $30 a month and Rentec Direct $45 a month (!)
4. Must be easy-to-use. QB Online doesn't seem to support rentals "out of the box". Some people set up buildings as Customers, and units as Jobs (or maybe Tenants?), while some set it up with buildings being Categories - (!) and if we choose the wrong model, we’re stuck forever? We can’t even change the term “Customers” to “Buildings” so we’re concerned about how any produced reports would look.
5. We don't need it to be able to send out and pay bills, or track rents (apart from rental income) - we have PMs/Appfolios for that.
6. We don’t want to rely on downloading transactions from an online bank - since most of our online activity is tracked through the 3 appfolio's we’ll have to manually enter it all. (That's ok!)

Any suggestions?

By the way, are there are BP Webinars on Accounting? We couldn't see any, but that’d be helpful :)  

Thanks!